Why You Need to Move to the New Facebook Pixel – NOW!

If you’re the one at your company in charge of running Facebook ads, you likely know about the Facebook pixel and how helpful it is in strategizing your ad campaigns. If you are familiar with what we’re talking about and already LOVE the new Facebook pixel, skip down to “What is happening to the old conversion pixel” subsection to find out more about your looming deadline to switch over to the new pixel.

If you’re saying to yourself “what the heck is the Facebook pixel?” let’s start from the beginning and break it down…

What is Facebook Pixel?

In its most basic form, a pixel is simply a piece of code. So what is the Facebook pixel code? The Facebook pixel allows you to place a single piece of JavaScript code on your entire website to report conversions, build audiences and get extremely useful insights about how people use your website. This pixel gives you data on the types of actions people take on your site – across devices – that helps arm you as you create future campaigns. A pixel is actually an image of a size 1 x 1px (hence the name) that is loaded by a browser when a user accesses a page.

Why the Pixel Matters

The new Facebook pixel allows you to track actions such as registering, purchasing items, video views and other actions taken on your website. These actions can be used to retarget audiences, find new customers, track conversions coming from your Facebook ads, and ultimately allow Facebook to automatically optimize your ads to result in more of these actions.

What's Happening to the Old Conversion Pixel?

In the past, Facebook marketers had multiple pixels to choose from:

Website Custom Audience Pixel was a single pixel used across a website to target a select group of people towards whom your ads would be targeted.

Conversion Pixels are individual pixels used for tracking and optimizing conversions of site visitors to paying customers. Each product page had its own unique pixel, allowing Facebook to report and optimize for that specific conversion.

While each Facebook advertising account had only one custom audience pixel, you could create many conversion pixels—one for each web page you wanted to track conversions on.

Facebook has now made one universal Facebook pixel that combines both of the above. Once the code is placed on your website, the pixel will track all activity firing throughout your website for the duration of your Facebook ad campaigns.

IMPORTANT FACT:Facebook plans to disable the conversion tracking pixel altogether on February 15 of 2017, so you need to switch over to the new Facebook pixel ASAP. Your old custom audience pixel was already upgraded to the new version, so don’t worry about that one.

Main Features of the New Facebook Pixel

The new pixel includes several cool improvements and new features that can lead to significant improvements in your ROI:

One pixel to do it all

Faster page load time

Multiple event tracking

Dynamic products ads to retarget across multiple products/pages

Here’s the lowdown…

One Pixel to Do it All

Until now, as we mentioned above, there were two types of Facebook pixels with different functions: Audience Pixels and Conversion Pixels. It was quite normal for a website to have several pixels, either on different pages or even within the same page, which often led to problems related to page loading speed or page errors, among others. Now, it’s once and done – it has retargeting, optimization and tracking capabilities all built into one small, yet powerful, piece of code.

Page Load Time is 3x Faster

Having only one pixel manage the tracking on your page allows your page to load faster – a feature your target audience is sure to appreciates. There’s nothing more annoying than clicking on an ad to get to a website that doesn’t load. Who has patience for that?

Adding to that target audience attraction, with the new pixel, all the information associated is sent to Facebook once. Thus, increasing communication speed and reducing the risk of errors.

Multiple Event Tracking

The old conversion pixel allowed tracking 5 different types of user actions:

Checkouts

Registrations

Leads

Key Page Views

Adds to Cart

While these actions may have been enough for some businesses, the new pixel provides more types of information as well as expanded parameters for the type of information reported.

Now, the new pixel allows tracking 9 different user actions (or standard events). Each of these standard events can incorporate a series of parameters that could provide additional data.

The new standard events available are:

View Content

Search

Add to Cart

Add to Wishlist

Start Checkout process

Add Payment Information

Complete Purchase

Lead

Complete registration

The list of expanded parameters available for information about the events:

Value

Currency

Content Name: for the name of the page or product

Content category (for the product category)

Content Ids (such as SKUs)

Content Type (downloadable product, physical product, etc.)

Number of Items

Search String (if users search for particular terms on the site)

Status (To confirm if a registration has been completed or not)

Not hard to imagine all of the added value to your conversion tracking! You can retarget with a specific ROI goal in mind.

Dynamic Products Ads

Retargeting can easily be done if you have just a few products or pages to manage. But Dynamic Product Ads are a more efficient way to handle retargeting when you have a broader range of products or pages.

With these Dynamic Product Ads, you can promote relevant products to shoppers who are already browsing your product catalog on your website or mobile app. In other words, you’re hitting them where they already are, increasing the likelihood of them being interested in your ad.

You can now place the Facebook pixel on your website and modify it to report when product IDs from your catalogue are viewed, added to cart, or purchased. You then create dynamic ads promoting one or multiple products, which will be displayed in Facebook’s Newsfeed, right-hand column and the Audience Network. As shoppers browse your website or app, ads are specially formatted and served up to each of them, according to the products they browse with keywords, images, and other data pulled directly from your product catalog.

Dynamic Product Ads also provide a more efficient and comprehensive reporting process. For example, information can be reported about the revenue generated, products sold, number of items sold per transaction, user behavior, and so on.

Pretty awesome, right?!

Now all that’s left for you to do is to upgrade to the new Facebook pixel! Or, if your head is totally swimming over all this talk about pixels, conversions and retargeting, give us a call and we’ll handle this for you.

But before you go, check out our super informative and FREE e-guide on how to use Facebook to increase your sales.